July 27ths

7/27/1997            

Idea: Video of guitar solos/performances.            

[7/27/2024: At the time I had the idea of producing a series of videotapes, but YouTube made this possible 10 years later. We knew what the internet was, and some people had crude dial-up, but it was beyond our ken that you could watch TV on it. To some degree, music instruction videos have made music education unserious entertainment. No one could possibly want to do things like voice-leading exercises, practicing rhythms, and sight reading. Every new technology steals something away and sometimes re-integrates older ones: Radio stole time away from books, TV stole time away from radio and books, the internet stole time away from rigorous activities, but looped in radio (podcasts) and TV (streaming video), social media stole time away from everything: what it does mostly is to share things we’ll never have time for, AI steals time away from book reading and perhaps video because we can now summarize them with LLMs, it steals time away from manual creativity: why paint a painting or write a song? It actually makes more time for it and we can produce more content to share, but we’re not doing anything resembling what we did 100 years ago? Making videos of guitar performances stole time away from the craft itself, so the activity is now video production for a TV station, so time spent learning all 12 keys is now about cameras, mics, lighting, editing, etc].

7/27/1998            
         
Jazz is really pandiatonicism played simultaneously by a number of instruments.            

Watching travelogue about a jazz cruise through the Mediterranean. They had some footage of Pompeii with cocktail jazz playing in the background and I thought, “Jazz has nothing to do with Pompeii.”

7/27/2011

At the theoretical level, song hooks are imbued with clever twists like harmonic modulations, chord ‘borrowing’ and turnarounds. Now these devices have devolved from the songwriter’s toolkit in much the same way Cole Porter moon/June rhyming schemes became obsolete by the 1960s in favor of new compositional devices that made them frumpy and old hat. The classic bridge is now in this category. Nonetheless I still love to put them in songs. [More] 

7/27/2017            

Appoggiatura:

7/27/2023 

Black-out lyric line idea: 

Randy Meisner died. What I liked (and still like) about the Eagles, is they were the sugar that made the country music medicine go down.